2024 wasn’t the best year for me when it came to reading. For one reason or another, I didn’t read as many books as I wanted, which is a shame.
However, the books I read, including the ones below, were enjoyable. I read a mix of fiction and non-fiction on a wide range of topics such as the environment to a gripping fictional story of finding a mysterious device installed in a rocket!
Among the list, you’ll find books you might be familiar with and some you won’t. There are some by famous authors such as Thomas Pynchon and some more obscure ones, such as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han.
A goal of mine for 2025 is to read more fiction; although there are few fiction books on here, next year’s list should have more. For now, I hope you enjoy this list and maybe end up reading some of the books below!
Table of Contents
Inherent Vice
- The New York Times bestseller • Named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and Los Angeles Times“The funniest book Pynchon has written
- ” —Rolling Stones“Entertainment of a high order
- ” —Time MagazinePart noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era
- It’s been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex-girlfriend
- Suddenly out of nowhere she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with
Inherent Vice is a fantastic and typically funny read by the amazing Thomas Pynchon.
It’s a detective novel set in the 1970s, revolving around a scheme involving a property developer, but it doesn’t read like a conventional detective novel.
Pynchon’s typical subversive style comes to the fore. He has a great gift for keeping you glued to the pages as you follow the plot.
Inherent Vice is much more accessible than some of Pynchon’s other books, such as Gravity’s Rainbow, which is also on this list. It’s not too dense and you can follow the plot without too much trouble, which isn’t always the case with Pynchon.
Homelands
- Drawing on half a century of firsthand experience and exemplary scholarship, Timothy Garton Ash tells the story of postwar Europe’s triumphs and tragedies Winner of the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize • A Financial Times Best Book of 2023 “An irresistibly well-written book, fluent, witty, and intelligent
- ”—Neal Acherson, New York Review of Books Timothy Garton Ash, Europe’s “historian of the present,” has been “breathing Europe” for the last half century
- In Homelands he embarks on a journey in time and space around the postwar continent, drawing on his own notes from many great events, giving vivid firsthand accounts of its leading actors, revisiting the places where its history was made, and recalling its triumphs and tragedies through their imprint on the present
- Garton Ash offers an account of events as seen from the ground—history illustrated by memoir
- He describes how Europe emerged from wartime devastation to rebuild, to triumph with the fall of the Berlin Wall, to democratize and unite
Homelands was one of the most interesting books I read in 2024.
Written by the historian Timothy Garton Ash, it recounts his travels throughout Europe from his 20s to the present day alongside commentary on events on the continent such as the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s remarkable how much Garton Ash has seen and how many important figures in European history he’s acquainted with. This lends his accounts more weight and makes the book more compelling.
I don’t think Homelands is as good an account of the continent as Geert Mak’s In Europe. However, it’s still a brilliant read, a good complement to some of the best books on Europe, and will give you a great insight into Europe’s recent history.
Gravity’s Rainbow
- Winner of the National Book Award”The most profound and accomplished American novel since the end of World War II
- ” —The New Republic“A screaming comes across the sky
- ” A few months after the Germans’ secret V-2 rocket bombs begin falling on London, British Intelligence discovers that a map of the city pinpointing the sexual conquests of one Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, U
Gravity’s Rainbow is arguably Thomas Pynchon’s most well-known novel and one of his most challenging.
After reading The Crying of Lot 49 in 2023, I wanted to read another of his novels. But the only one my local bookstore had was this 700-page behemoth!
It’s a challenging novel to read without multiple plot points and characters, and I found it hard to follow at times. However, it’s a gripping read and Pynchon’s unique style makes it all the more so.
This isn’t a book for the fainthearted but it’s rewarding if you stick with it as you read about this compelling and fun story about the race to acquire the bomb during the end of the Second World War.
The New Leviathans
- A bold, provocative reckoning with our current political delusions and dysfunctions
- Ever since its publication in 1651, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan has unsettled and challenged how we understand the world
- Condemned and vilified by each new generation, his cold political vision continues to see through any number of human political and ethical vanities
- In his wonderfully stimulating book The New Leviathans, John Gray allows us to understand the world of the 2020s with all its contradictions, moral horrors, and disappointments
- The collapse of the USSR ushered in an era of near apoplectic triumphalism in the West: a genuine belief that a rational, liberal, well-managed future now awaited humankind and that tyranny, nationalism, and unreason lay in the past
The New Leviathans is written by one of my favourite philosophers, John Gray. This is his latest book and a fascinating if troubling read.
It’s a critical look at the failings of liberalism in the context of Thomas Hobbes’ famous work, Leviathan, hence the name.
The striking thing about the book is how erudite Gray is, there are so many references to thinkers, I’d not encountered before. The other striking thing is how certain he is that liberalism is in big trouble.
If you believe in most tenets of liberalism, like me, this is a troubling thought. What comes after liberalism is something that might not be as accommodating.
Fiesta (The Sun Also Rises)
- The only authorized edition of Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, presented by the Hemingway family with illuminating supplementary material from the Hemingway Collection at the John F
- Kennedy Library
- “The ideal companion for troubled times: equal parts Continental escape and serious grappling with the question of what it means to be, and feel, lost
- ” — The Wall Street Journal Named one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read The Sun Also Rises is a classic example of Hemingway’s spare but powerful writing style
- It celebrates the art and craft of Hemingway’s quintessential story of the Lost Generation
The Sun Also Rises, also known as Fiesta, was a book that I found when I was travelling in Spain in the gift shop of the bullring in Ronda.
I’d never read a Hemingway book, so I thought I’d get it and give it a read. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a brilliant read that describes a trip to Europe by Americans during the 1920s.
I’d heard a lot about Hemingway’s style of writing, and he’s indeed very economical with his words. But this doesn’t detract from his storytelling abilities.
The Sun Also Rises is a brilliant story of love and death and expatriates living in a very different culture. It’s considered one of Hemingway’s best novels and has only made me want to read his books even more!
The Disappearance of Rituals
- Untrammelled neoliberalism and the inexorable force of production have produced a 21st century crisis of community: a narcissistic cult of authenticity and mass turning-inward are among the pathologies engendered by it
- We are individuals afloat in an atomised society, where the loss of the symbolic structures inherent in ritual behaviour has led to overdependence on the contingent to steer identity
- Avoiding saccharine nostalgia for the rituals of the past, Han provides a genealogy of their disappearance as a means of diagnosing the pathologies of the present
- He juxtaposes a community without communication – where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning – to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics
- The community that is invoked everywhere today is an atrophied and commoditized community that lacks the symbolic power to bind people together
The Disappearance of Rituals, by the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, is a fascinating book on how rituals once commonplace have disappeared in the modern world.
Chul-Han is an interesting philosopher who tends to focus on the prevailing political philosophy of neoliberalism affecting the individual and society. This book is no different.
It’s an intriguing and short read that’s easily accessible for most people. Chul-Han’s premise is that modern society has done away with rituals that used to bind us all together and this is one reason for the increasing alienation many of us feel.
Medieval societies tended to have many more feasts and festivals than we do, and with the decline of religion, the rituals associated with it are becoming less common too.
It’s an interesting hypothesis and one I think has some credence in an increasingly atomised world.
The Immortalization Commission
- Immortality committee “Jockey of Anti-Antichrist,” “Idol Destroyer,” “Thriller of the Philosophical System,” John Gray returned
- This time, we dig up the huge project behind the science
- John Gray has been regarded as one of the most provocative and controversial writers of his time, after his unprecedented criticism of the enormous heritage of the Western Enlightenment in his previous work “Homeless Man, Homo raffienes”
- In this book he captures the sight of those shocked by Darwins discovery into the magical science and reveals its illusion
- In this book, The story of the Victorian eminent people and the Soviet Bolshevik intellectuals who led the immortalization project
The Immortalization Commission is another of John Gray’s books on this list, as I slowly make my way through his back catalogue.
I think this was the seventh or eighth of his books that I’ve read and this one was an intriguing one as it looks at attempts to cheat death throughout recent history.
This is a topic that’s relevant more than ever these days with biohacking influencers such as Bryan Johnson touting their methods on social media. However, Gray shows that has been a recurring theme throughout recent history and an unsuccessful one at that.
Gray draws on a range of figures, notably many in the early Soviet Union to illustrate his case, and makes a compelling argument for why trying to cheat death is a fool’s game.
Wasteland
- NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 BY THE NEW YORKER, THE GUARDIAN, and KIRKUS REVIEWS An award-winning investigative journalist takes a deep dive into the global waste crisis, exposing the hidden world that enables our modern economy—and finds out the dirty truth behind a simple question: what really happens to what we throw away? In Wasteland, journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis takes us on a shocking journey inside the waste industry—the secretive multi-billion dollar world that underpins the modern economy, quietly profiting from what we leave behind
- In India, he meets the waste-pickers on the front line of the plastic crisis
- In the UK, he journeys down sewers to confront our oldest—and newest—waste crisis, and comes face-to-face with nuclear waste
- In Ghana, he follows the after-life of our technology and explores the global export network that results in goodwill donations clogging African landfills
- From an incinerator to an Oklahoma ghost-town, Franklin-Wallis travels in search of the people and companies that really handle waste—and on the way, meets the innovators and campaigners pushing for a cleaner and less wasteful future
Wasteland was one of the most interesting books I read in 2024, especially as reducing the amount of waste I produce is a key goal of mine.
The book primarily focuses on the UK, but the author also ventures abroad to places such as India, to highlight how rubbish we produce as a species.
It’s a harrowing read at times as you realise how much we consume and how little of it is reused or even recycled. It put my efforts to be more environmentally friendly into perspective.
Wasteland is a good complement to some of the best books on the environment as it will help you realise just how much of an issue consumer culture is.
It opened my eyes to how much we all consume and maybe it will do the same for you too.
50 Philosophy Ideas
- In a series of 50 accessible essays, Ben Dupré introduces and explains the philosophical questions around knowledge, consciousness, identity, ethics and justice that have engaged the minds of thinkers from the Ancient Greeks to the present day
- From Plato’s cave to virtue ethics, theories of punishment to animal rights, 50 Philosophy Ideas You Really Need to Know is a complete introduction to the most important philosophical concepts in history
50 Philosophy Ideas is a brilliant little book that gives you an overview of some of the most well-known philosophical concepts.
I bought this book as I wanted to learn more about philosophy and some of the concepts that underpin the discipline. This book was perfect for that.
It looks at 50 common ideas, such as animal rights, the allegory of the cave and much more. If you’re unfamiliar with philosophy, it’s a brilliant book to get started with.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading it and felt like I had a greater appreciation and understanding of the world around me and myself after reading it.
The Lost Rainforests of Britain
- WINNER OF THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR CONSERVATION 2023 The Sunday Times Science Book of the Year As seen on Countryfile‘If anyone was born to save Britain’s rainforests, it was Guy Shrubsole’ Sunday TimesShortlisted for the Richard Jefferies Society Literary PrizeTemperate rainforest may once have covered up to one-fifth of Britain, inspiring Celtic druids, Welsh wizards, Romantic poets, and Arthur Conan Doyle’s most loved creations
- Though only fragments now remain, they are home to a dazzling variety of luminous life-forms
- In this awe-inspiring investigation, Guy Shrubsole travels through the Western Highlands and the Lake District, down to the rainforests of Wales, Devon, and Cornwall to map these spectacular lost worlds for the first time
- This is the extraordinary tale of one person’s quest to find Britain’s lost rainforests – and bring them back
- Guy Shrubsole’s The Lost Rainforests of Britain was a Sunday Times bestseller w/c 2023-04-30*
The Lost Rainforests of Britain was an intriguing book I read at the start of the year that looks at an underappreciated part of Britain’s past.
For thousands of years, temperate rainforests populated most of the western part of the country, providing some of the most impressive and diverse flora and fauna on the Isles.
Today, most of these rainforests are either gone or remain in fragments scattered across the western part of the country. I was unaware we even had rainforests in Britain until I read this book!
If you want to learn more about Britain’s past from a natural history perspective, this is a must-read. Given the challenges of climate change we face, learning how our environment can help mitigate the impacts is more important than ever.
Read More of My Best of The Year Lists
Check out the links below to read more of my favourite books from each year!